Lessons from a decade building commercial engines across India, the Middle East, and the UK — on GTM strategy, enterprise sales, and leading through uncertainty.
When I joined as a founding BD hire tasked with selling AI/ML to factories afraid of it, I was afraid of it too. A framework built in rehab helped me crack enterprise AI adoption.
India is not one market. It's three buyer generations overlaid with radical regional complexity. If you don't know who you're pitching to, you'll fail before the demo ends.
"Small TAM, can't afford it, too fragmented." These narratives come from people whose MEA experience is a transit layover in Dubai. The ground reality is far different.
GCC malls closed overnight. A retail conglomerate had a WhatsApp support line but nobody thought to sell through it — until we did. One signal, 14 days, millions in revenue.
UK enterprise customers want the binary answer. My instinct was to ask "why?" and calculate ROI. That tension — and what I learned from it — changed how I approach every market.
Marketing hit MQL targets. SDRs hit meetings booked. AEs hit SALs. SEs hit demos. Everyone hit their individual number — and revenue still missed. The problem was never the handoffs.
During regional escalations in the Gulf, an 8-year-old, a 6-month-old, and an imminent air-attack warning forced me to apply the same resilience framework I use in business.